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High-C writes, "A bunch of us nerdcore hip-hop artists have gotten together and released a Halloween-themed CD. Seventeen creepy, darker-than-they-should-be songs from total nerds, with seven different CD covers. What's not to love? The perfect soundtrack for tonight's Halloween parties. And of course, the track listings are in hex."

For those of us who party *and* work, having a party on Saturday (Oct 28) works a little smarter than having one a Tuesday (Oct 31). I mean, when was the last time you want to a Christmas party on Christmas?

I think you have to be a nerd to understand what "tonight's" Halloween parties refers toIf someone says, "Today's teenagers are so reckless." They aren't saying just teenagers on this exact day, but referring to modern teenagers in general. If the poster said, "The perfect soundtrack for today's Halloween parties." I don't think there would be much question in regards to what "today's" is referring to. It would just refer to modern Halloween parties. But by using the word "tonight", he has solidified his ne

I'm the fifth reply. I'm going to do you a favor and NOT repeat the above four posters.I'm sure you'll thank me someday.

As for nerd music, I'm beginning to think I'm not actually a nerd. Decoding the titles of songs on some CD sounds about as fun as watching a swimming pool evaporate.

It's like, why would you do that when you could go read Mt. St. Helens seismographs, or learn about a new species of tarantula, or take apart the code for a cool open source game engine? You know, or build a light with a pho

I do not know where you live, but some of the biggest Halloween parties are held on the weekend before Halloween (yesterday/today).Usually, on October 31st, you go trick-or-treating with the kids, and adults party the weekend before.

And where I live (Cincinnati), three of the biggest Halloween parties are all being held tonight - Cincinnati Sports League, Hustler and The Morgue. I'm sure there are more, though, but I'm off to the CSL party, dressed as a cross between an Orc and a Ringwraith, while the woman

Do you suppose he DIDN'T get the idea from the above TEN POSTS?!Dear GOD, I actually thought the exact same thing as him when I read it too. Like one third of the comments on this story are telling this guy that they intend to party tonight rather than on the 31st.

Did it occur to ANYONE that some people have kids, and those kids are all getting ready for Tuesday? Did it occur to ANYONE that so are their parents? What if, in some parts of the universe, people who have kids all get together, and instead of

Though it's understandable for someone from slashdot not to grasp this concept, generally, parties occur on the weekend. That way when one is out late, drinking or what have you, they can sleep in the next day.

Here's a hip hop Halloween video to go with the CDs. It's awesome, if only for the appearance of Dragon Mummy and the revelation that werewolves can give people Parkinson's disease. CC licensed BY-NC-ND.

Just an FYI - the compilation is 5 CDs, and there's a separate torrent for each disc. Right now, volume I's torrent is in great shape, but III and IV need some help. (II's torrent file seems to be missing from the server.)

Umm, perhaps those who might be interested in this appreciate being informed ahead of time? I suspect that people who throw Halloween parties don't wait until the afternoon of the 31st to make plans and get everything they'll need.

"Use the halloween webcams to view live images of a buncha halloween decorations & lights and also CONTROL them - heck, you can even inflate (or deflate) the giant Frankenstein & Homer Simpson - D'oh! The webcams run 7x24 and you can turn stuff on & off from 1800 to 2200 MDT (GMT-6). Plus you can send "Instant Messages via Webcam" for everyone to see."

Checked this out but it was more of a halloween rap album unfortunately. Does anyone happen to have music (individual songs or an entire album even) that would work well to play over the speakers as the trick or treaters are roaming around? Looking for spooky tracks. So far Thriller is about the only thing I've come up with. With or without vocals, just some spooky music or sound fx would be fine.

Check out the "Doomed" channel on http://www.somafm.com/ [somafm.com] if you can feed your speakers from the computer. Last year they had a dedicated Halloween channel. This year, it appears they're using their spookiest channel for double-duty. It's not light-- mostly metal, industrial, techno-- and there probably won't be a lot you've heard before, but it's definitely scary and a good mix!

Raison D'Etre should work. I bought a bunch of Peter Andersson's stuff a while back. It's usually classified as Dark Ambient, monks singing, bells, etc. You can get a small sample on amazon [amazon.com], but the best place to buy them is directly from the Artist [coldmeat.se]--maybe buy it for next year.:)

Endura (esp. their album Black Eden [metal-observer.com]), a friend of mine put this on with som candles a autumn night when he wanted to snuggle with his gf, she was not impressed... Dark Dark Ambient

Ulver is always a safe card (if you know which ones are ambient and which ones sounds like white noise) try Perdition City, Blood Inside and A quick fix of melancholy EP

When MC Frontalot coined the term "nerdcore" it was funny and pithy, but that was mainly because he had a bunch of clever songs which he imbued with all of his original lyrics and nerdy references, and happened to also be good at making music. As in, understanding melody and rhythm and so on, you know to like, make a fucking song.

Every other "nerdcore" thing I have ever seen is a bunch of no-talent jerkoffs doing a crappy imitation of crappy mass-market gangsta rap and throwing in a couple of computer references. They sound like they made the music in their bedroom at their mom's house, and while that is probably true it does not make for good music that any sensible person would listen to by choice.

I have really been enjoying "NerdCore". Thank you for making it, folks.
I could do without some of the juvenile/mysoginistic references to "bithces" and "whoers" ,
but hopefully the emulation of the Pollution known as Gang-Star-Rappe will stop or slow.
In any case, Thank You to all of the Artists, Contributors, Compilers, and Interpeters.
And before some fo' want to "step on me" and call me a Loser, I'll have you know I've been:
-- Married for decades
-- Working with computers for decades
-- Have mo

There is a lot of shitty Nerdcore stuff out there, but within the piles of tracks accumulated on these albums as well as other varied sources you'll find a decent number of gems. Just about anything by the Futuristic Sex Robotz, Monzy's few tracks, and a few of MC Plus+'s come to mind first. There's also Beefy, Black as Bleech, Ytcracker, Frontalittle Squad, and of course MC's Front and Hawking (which at least sorta counts) for decent tracks.
Though anyone with a good geeky (and sick) sense of humor and

well, since pretty much EVERY SINGLE COMMENT thus far has been either "duh its not halloween yet" or "nerdcore is shitty music made by wannabes in their basements", I thought I'd try to offer a positive comment here...

(Though, by now, I guess I've realized that if you think you can post something creative to slashdot and actually get something other than knee-jerk reactions and bitter, jaded comments, you're just asking for it... If there's one thing I've learned, it's that Slashdotters can be mean.)

So I just wanted to say: Here are some people who've gotten together and made some music, and published it on the web under a creative commons license, just being happy if people listen and enjoy their stuff. Here's a big THANK YOU for having a great attitude in your work. Tip 'o the hat.

(Actually I don't see a license on their site... I guess that means its Public Domain by default? In any case..)

Actually I don't see a license on their site... I guess that means its Public Domain by default? In any case..

Definitely not. IANAL, but I know enough law to know that no copyright notice is necessary any longer to guard a copyright. The best bet would be to assume that you are given an implied license to listen to the music off the website (and possibly to download it for your own listening since it is available as a RAR downlad, though since they've said nothing about it it is hazy legal territory) an

Ahahahahaha. Absolutely not. Every work is automatically copyrighted by default (even without a (C) anywhere), and it's extremely difficult (read: nearly impossible on the internet) to just BAM make something public domain, according to Prof. Larry Lessig (law prof at Stanford and founder of the Creative Commons). Yes, in our fucked up copyright world, we've taken away the artist's right to make something public domain.

Any compression - Music files do not compress well. The advantage of compression in terms of size is, at most, a few percent for MP3s. There is an advantage in having everything in one file though.

Archive formats within a torrent - I can understand compressing source code or text or other stuff that is actually COMPRESSIBLE in a torrent, but the tiny percentage gain in file size you get from compressing already-compressed music is fully negated by the fact that it is guaranteed that if the torrent content is not in an "immediately usable" form, people are less likely to seed it, because instead of just seeding the content that they have to keep around already to listen to (or view in the case of video), they have to keep one copy around stuck in an archive to seed and a separate copy of the content in a usable form.

I'm not surprised some of these torrents are lacking seeds due to this issue.

Well, sure, the practical nerd would use ZIP, the traditional nerd would use.tar.gz, and the modern nerd would use BZ2 -- but are you sure there aren't any open implementations of RAR? What about 7-zip?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR [wikipedia.org] - "Despite widespread confusion there does not seem to be any open source implementation to decompress newer than version 2.0 RAR archives (7-zip uses a proprietary plugin under "unRAR license" for decompression)." - I suspect that if an open-source RAR archiver/unarchiver existed, it would be in Gentoo Portage, but only the "official" binary-only RAR implementation is.

Still, in this case, using *any* compression format on already-compressed audio files is a Bad Idea if you

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR - "Despite widespread confusion there does not seem to be any open source implementation to decompress newer than version 2.0 RAR archives (7-zip uses a proprietary plugin under "unRAR license" for decompression)." - I suspect that if an open-source RAR archiver/unarchiver existed, it would be in Gentoo Portage, but only the "official" binary-only RAR implementation is.

The license.txt file included in that tarball says:
"The source code of unRAR utility is freeware."and
"The unRAR utility may be freely distributed."However:
"The unRAR sources... cannot be used to re-create the RAR compressio